Chris Rufo joins the show all about disparate impact, affirmative action, and Harvard and Princeton. And secondly, we then have Senator Mark Wayne Mullen from the great state of Oklahoma talk about Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and one big, beautiful bill.
00:00:00.000Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
00:00:04.000Christopher Rufo joins the show, all about disparate impact, affirmative action, DEI, and Harvard and Princeton.
00:00:09.000And secondly, we then have Senator Mark Wayne Mullen from the great state of Oklahoma talk about Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and one big, beautiful bill.
00:00:16.000Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com, and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
00:00:35.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:43.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:22.000Joining us right off of the top is Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, friend of mine, and we want to get into the news of the day.
00:01:27.000There's a lot that we need to cover, including Pete Hegseth.
00:01:32.000Pete Hegseth is a friend of both of ours who's under relentless assault, even though recruitment is up and procurement is in the right direction and military exercises are up and war games are up and the woke stuff is gone.
00:01:45.000Pete Hegseth, by all objective outside measurements, is succeeding, and despite that, he is under merciless assault.
00:01:51.000Senator Mark Wayne Mullen is with us now.
00:02:14.000I'll tell you, the Senate Republican GOP is standing solid behind Pete.
00:02:18.000We understand this is this attack, another character assassination, trying to get rid of a guy because he's daring to challenge status quo.
00:02:28.000He's made some big changes inside DOD, and we know they needed to be made.
00:02:33.000And so since he's ruffling feathers, he's also made some enemies throughout the media and obviously throughout the Democrat Party.
00:02:41.000I will tell you, our support hasn't changed.
00:02:55.000They had started leaning in towards a Democrat party that has lost their direction of understanding what lethality is, what mission ready is.
00:03:06.000And about the warfighter, they became very risk adverse and tried to play politics.
00:03:13.000You can't win wars and you can't deter our enemies by playing politics.
00:03:18.000And Pete is restoring the DOD's mission.
00:04:34.000But we feel like there's a way to get around it.
00:04:38.000One thing that we're trying to keep from happening is actually allowing the Democrats To have a hearing on this, because the hearing wouldn't be for production.
00:04:45.000It would be for promotion and a production for them to be able to go out and show their base, their fighting, and stir up stuff.
00:04:54.000If it was actually a meeting of substance, we would maybe up for it.
00:05:52.000But how do you know if you did not ask him?
00:05:57.000Well, because I know what he's said many times in court, and that's the proper forum for debating this.
00:06:04.000So he goes all the way down to El Salvador to try and petition to get a non-American from El Salvador to come back to America, who obviously is part of MS-13.
00:06:23.000Two judges had already said and already suggested that he should be deported.
00:06:28.000He had a rap sheet since he's been inside the United States.
00:06:32.000Keep in mind, his first time to have contact with the police, he had a wad of cash, he had baggies of drugs, and he had cash that had the symbol, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, which is a direct coalition to...
00:06:53.000But here you have Senator Van Hollen, who spent taxpayer dollars to fly down to meet with an illegal alien that entered the country illegally, that had broke the law since he'd been here, that had ties to an organization.
00:07:42.000But his constituents should see that he's not fighting for the rule of law.
00:07:46.000He's fighting for himself so he doesn't get caught up in this same situation that Chuck Schumer's caught up in and could cost him his office.
00:07:55.000You don't have Democrats that are serving for the good of the American people.
00:08:00.000You have Democrats that are self-serving themselves.
00:08:01.000And that's what's happening inside the Democrat Party right now.
00:08:05.000We're hearing from the Trump White House.
00:08:37.000We feel like our timeline, it's not set in stone, but our timeline, we would love to be able to deliver this to the president's desk before Memorial Weekend.
00:08:45.000Now, I will tell you, that's a tall order because there's details that we can get into on some real differences between the House and the Senate and why current policy versus current law and tax policy.
00:08:55.000It plays a huge pivotal point in this.
00:09:00.000Ask 10 people to define the word capitalism.
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00:09:05.000This is a word that comes up all the time, but does anyone know what it really means?
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00:10:00.000Let me just kind of go through three things.
00:10:02.000No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and then finally the kind of middle-class tax cut, no tax on Social Security.
00:10:09.000Is this a realistic thing that you think we're going to get in the big, beautiful bill?
00:10:12.000Well, we can't do – there's some stuff in Social Security we can't get to, so there's some of the no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security that may not fit within the Byrd rule.
00:10:39.000So what the budget did is it instructed the Senate more than instructed the House on what can and can't go into the bill.
00:10:46.000Remember, you only get one shot at it.
00:10:48.000If you get the bill and you send it up and it's against the Byrd rule, you've got to scrap the bill, redo the whole thing all over again.
00:10:56.000So we have to work with the parliamentarian moving forward.
00:10:59.000The best way to describe it is the House can put it in there.
00:11:01.000The House can put whatever they want into a bill.
00:11:03.000But that's kind of considering the House can walk into a warehouse through the open dock door, and once they get in, they have to close it, and then the Senate has to knock the glass out of the top part of it and try to squeeze everything in through the Byrd rule.
00:11:16.000So we don't know if it can get in there or not.
00:11:19.000We've got a bill that addresses it, that tries to make it in, but remember, it's an appropriation bill, so some of the stuff with Social Security can't be touched in it.
00:11:40.000Because tax cuts are wonderful, but if we do not have equal, if not greater, spending cuts, then we're just going to keep on driving up the deficit.
00:11:48.000Are your colleagues thinking in this way?
00:11:55.000That's our target of cuts, 1.5 trillion.
00:11:58.000I feel like we can hit that, but it's hard once you really get in there because, you know, everybody's got great ideas, but when you actually put the concept down on how it's going to be delivered, it's tough.
00:12:21.000Rescission, basically, and Elon and I had a conversation about this yesterday, that anything that isn't appropriated by Congress...
00:12:28.000Meaning that this, like USAID, that wasn't reauthorized by Congress and we didn't directly appropriate dollars for those programs they were doing, they can be rescinded.
00:12:39.000And when they're rescinded, now they can also be taken away and the president chooses not to spend it.
00:12:45.000But when you rescind it and he sends it to Congress as a rescission package, if Congress votes on it to rescind it, then the next president can't come up and just restart the program.
00:13:00.000So we're working really close with Doge and Elon to get this done.
00:13:03.000Then reconciliation, we can go back in farther and make cuts to the agencies themselves, which is where we're going to be targeting $1.5 trillion.
00:13:17.000I don't want to give people false hope.
00:13:19.000When we really start putting the pen and paper together, that's our target $1.5 trillion.
00:13:25.000And then we're going to slowly get our house back in order.
00:13:27.000What we're really trying to do is get back, and I think Ron Johnson has said this the best, we'd really like to get to 2019 spending levels pre-COVID.
00:13:36.000And that way we can actually have a true path to balance the budget.
00:13:40.000And the president has said, made it very clear, he wants to balance the budget.
00:13:49.000But keep in mind, we probably need to try doing that.
00:13:52.000If we can't do it in FY26, we're going to definitely have to do it by FY28 because, God forbid, something happens in the midterm and we were to lose one of the chambers, no way the Democrat Party is going to let us balance the budget.
00:14:02.000They're going to be uninterested in that.
00:14:03.000You're caught up to speed now on the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, charges of obstruction.
00:14:23.000This just shows you that they do a lot of stuff behind closed doors and they can't do it in public, but they're acting fast on it.
00:14:29.000I mean, this is just a case that actually developed a week ago that Cash was able to put the information together and arrest a judge for obstruction of justice, for literally a running blocker.
00:14:45.000Cash and Pam are working every day to get this woke, political-motivated bench literally and start holding them accountable.
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00:16:24.000You have a major story here that I know that you've been focusing on.
00:16:29.000Tell our audience about the disparate impact study that you have been on and what that actually means in practice.
00:16:37.000Christopher Ruffo, the floor is yours.
00:16:39.000Well, right now we are doing a series of investigations into the Ivy League universities, beginning with Princeton.
00:16:46.000And the president of Princeton is a man named Christopher Eisgruber, who a couple of years ago said that Princeton was systemically racist.
00:16:54.000And he was right, but not in the way that he imagined.
00:16:57.000From the documents that we've obtained, the faculty that we've interviewed, we found that he has built a system of discrimination against whites, Asians, and Jews.
00:17:07.000Especially men from those different racial categories that are in total violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment.
00:17:16.000And so these documents from our report have now rocketed around the Department of Justice.
00:17:23.000And I think what's going to happen with these Ivy League universities is that they're going to be caught doing something illegal, but for the first time ever because the Trump administration is taking up these issues in a real way.
00:17:35.000They're actually going to pay an enormous price, and that's what we're seeing not just at Princeton, but really almost everywhere in higher education.
00:17:46.000Is it really a true quote that, quote, don't hire white men unless absolutely necessary?
00:17:52.000Is that a real quote out of Princeton University?
00:17:55.000That is a real quote, and it's not just a singular incident.
00:17:59.000My sources on the faculty at Princeton have said there is a...
00:18:03.000A kind of spoken and unspoken assumption in hiring that you have to do everything you can to avoid hiring white men in particular.
00:18:13.000And in this case, a professor was told explicitly, you cannot hire this person because he's a white man.
00:18:19.000This professor went to the department chair, who happens to be Jewish, and said, hey, this is what we did at Princeton to Jews, you know, 70, 80 years ago.
00:18:44.000And I know that Harmeet Dillon, who's at the Department of Justice Civil Rights as the deputy secretary, she's taking a close look at these policies.
00:18:55.000And she is a very good and very tough lawyer, as you know.
00:18:59.000And I don't think she's going to pull any punches.
00:19:01.000So all this has come to a head, obviously, with Harvard and President Trump signing executive orders.
00:19:07.000You did mention something with Princeton.
00:19:09.000They are in blatant violation of federal law.
00:19:11.000And Harvard, by the way, has been ignoring, just flatly ignoring federal law.
00:19:16.000Saying that, oh yeah, okay, fine, the Supreme Court ruled this, we don't really care.
00:19:21.000What penalties, what realistic penalties can the Trump administration usher and issue?
00:19:29.000When these colleges are actively discriminating against white people, and I just want the audience to imagine.
00:19:34.000Imagine if Princeton University was caught saying, don't hire black men unless absolutely necessary.
00:19:39.000I mean, it would be the number one news story on the planet for three months straight, and there would have to be marches and all that.
00:19:46.000But it's actually perfectly okay at Princeton to say, don't hire white men unless absolutely necessary.
00:19:51.000What can we do to actually hold these universities and penalize them for this?
00:19:56.000Well, we face a really critical question about our Constitution and our law.
00:20:01.000Does the law apply to all groups equally, or does the law apply to certain groups but not other groups?
00:20:08.000My contention is that we can only have a great country if the law applies to everyone equally.
00:20:13.000And so we should approach this with just as much urgency as President Eisenhower approached it in the 1950s and President Kennedy approached it in the 1960s.
00:20:24.000The first remedy is what the president has already put on the table, stripping federal funds from these institutions which are in violation of federal law.
00:20:33.000The second remedy is what's called a consent decree, which has been used by the left on police departments and other institutions, which basically means you put these universities under the control of a legal process and a federal judge who will oversee the administration from the inside to ensure that they're not discriminating.
00:20:54.000And then there's the third option that was used by Eisenhower and Kennedy, which is to send in federal troops, to send in the 101st airborne, to force these universities to desegregate, to stop discriminating and stop scapegoating.
00:21:09.000That's, of course, an ultimate option.
00:21:11.000I don't think we're there yet, but we should absolutely keep that kind of dramatic intervention on the table.
00:21:18.000Help our audience understand just how big of a deal it is, the executive order that President Trump signed on disparate impact, and how disparate impact has been used for admission standards, for remedial standards, disciplinary action, for even algebra.
00:21:34.000What is disparate impact, and what is the enormity of President Trump and his executive order that he signed the other day?
00:21:40.000Yeah, it's a historic move, and I'll explain disparate impact in pretty simple terms.
00:21:45.000When most Americans think about discrimination, they think about someone who says, you know, I don't like people from this certain group.
00:21:51.000We're not going to give them an opportunity.
00:21:52.000We're going to deny them employment or benefits or access to a public space.
00:21:58.000Disparate impact says the intention to discriminate doesn't matter.
00:22:02.000The action of deliberate discrimination against a group doesn't matter.
00:22:07.000All that matters is if there is a disparate or disproportionate number of people of one group.
00:22:20.000So this, of course, again, only applies one way.
00:22:23.000If you don't have enough African Americans at Harvard, it means that you have to provide a racial quota or a kind of positive discrimination as a remedy.
00:22:32.000But it doesn't apply to, for example, the NBA.
00:22:35.000We could say there are not enough Asian and Jewish players in the NBA, which...
00:22:41.000Under disparate impact theory means the NBA is discriminating against Asians and Jews.
00:22:45.000But that really just reveals the absurdity of the whole concept.
00:22:49.000The NBA is hyper-competitive, hyper-meritocratic.
00:22:52.000It just so happens that certain groups are not as dedicated or not as talented in basketball than other groups.
00:23:01.000And so what the president is saying is we're going to go back to actual, real, substantial discrimination as the test.
00:23:27.000And now the president is saying, we can't take these absurd standards and make them into law.
00:23:34.000All of this in combination, critical race theory, affirmative action, disparate impact, all that together has done what to education in this country, Christopher?
00:23:45.000And what can we see now that we are removing these burdens on our education system and businesses?
00:23:54.000How big of a deal is this for prosperity and the pursuit of excellence?
00:24:01.000It's beyond question that these left-wing racialist ideologies have compromised academic institutions, they've really degraded race relations in the United States, and they've turned many K-12 schools into these ideological training grounds.
00:24:20.000These executive orders are the beginning of reversing that process and moving America towards the standard of colorblind equality, under which everyone is treated equally as an individual.
00:24:30.000And not rewarded or punished based on their ancestry.
00:24:33.000That vision of America is extraordinarily popular.
00:24:37.000That is a vision of America that most, you know, everyday Americans support.
00:24:42.000And so what has to happen next to make that a reality is that the administration has to keep pressing forward on these policies to change the culture within these institutions, and then to take people like President Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton.
00:24:59.000Put him on the stand, punish him publicly and severely for the racial discrimination that he has perpetuated at his university, and really turn his reputation so negative that anyone else in that position will immediately say,
00:25:15.000"I better get my act together and stop discriminating, even if my predecessors have done so in the past."
00:25:22.000On top of that, President Trump is now disassembling the Department of Education, and he is sending it back to the states.
00:25:29.000I'm so hopeful that we finally have a president, we finally have an administration who's making education a top priority from K-12 mobility, from going after Harvard.
00:25:41.000Are you a little concerned, though, Christopher?
00:25:43.000And we'll pick this up after the break.
00:25:45.000That the weakest spot of these universities might not actually be the anti-Semitism critiques, which are legitimate, of course, but actually the violations of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment.
00:25:57.000What is your take on that strategically, Christopher?
00:25:59.000Well, look, here's what we have to do.
00:26:02.000I've had a lot of conversations with American Jews and friends who are very concerned about anti-Semitism.
00:26:09.000But what I've been recommending to them as the most successful strategy is not to say, American Jews need speech protections.
00:26:18.000American Jews need DEI, specifically on anti-Semitism.
00:26:22.000But actually, American Jews can tap into something much higher and much more powerful.
00:26:27.000This principle of universal standards to say every group needs protection from violence on campus.
00:26:36.000Every group needs to be treated equally and not rewarded or punished based on their racial, ethnic, or religious background.
00:26:43.000That is the winning argument, and we have to see anti-Semitism as really just the smallest nesting doll into this fervent, anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-American hatred.
00:26:56.000Bring that all together, bring it into a unifying vision that can protect not just American Jews, but people of all backgrounds.
00:27:06.000Y-R-E-F-Y has been the sponsor of this incredibly viral campus tour.
00:27:11.000Private student loan debt in America totals about $300 billion.
00:27:15.000About $45 billion of that is labeled as distressed.
00:27:18.000Y-R-E-F-Y refinances distressed or defaulted private student loans that others won't touch.
00:27:22.000Y-R-E-F-Y does not care what your credit score is.
00:27:54.000So places like Harvard, Christopher, are the trendy targets, but most people don't go.
00:28:02.000Well, I think you have to start at the top and then work your way downward.
00:28:11.000You know, universities are driven to a large part by social status.
00:28:15.000And so if you can change the social status at the Ivy League University, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, most notably, and then you could start changing the social status at the flagship state universities.
00:28:28.000Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, etc., you're going to send a very strong message downward that it is no longer safe, it is no longer high status, it is no longer even possible to have discriminatory DEI programs or to have this really anti-Semitic,
00:28:49.000anti-white, anti-American, and often anti-Asian.
00:28:55.000I think that's what you have to do, because we need to turn this into a cultural movement, not just a legal campaign.
00:29:03.000And that's really what we're fighting for.
00:29:05.000And we have to ground it, again, in this principle of colorblind equality, treating everyone equally as an individual.
00:29:12.000That's the frame that we have to deploy, and that is both the sword and the shield we have to use to defeat the left and the left.
00:29:24.000And they do this all in the spirit of allegedly getting rid of racism.
00:29:30.000They want to judge people based on race, and they say that we are trying to fight racism.
00:29:36.000You look at these executive orders combined.
00:29:38.000Getting rid of the affirmative action and hiring.
00:29:42.000Getting rid of critical race theory being taught in our schools.
00:29:45.000A lot of this is going to be debated within the courts.
00:29:48.000Christopher, are you optimistic that ultimately the Supreme Court will rule in favor of these very courageous executive orders from President Trump?
00:29:57.000I think all of these orders, you know, a lot of these policies were established by executive orders from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama to...
00:30:06.000And so he has absolute authority to rescind those executive orders and to turn the government in a new direction.
00:30:13.000That's the basic nature of his Article II powers under the Constitution.
00:30:17.000But the real tricky part, and where this is going to get tough, not only for these issues related to racial discrimination, but also for permanently dissolving the Department of Education, the president needs Congress to act.
00:30:31.000And judging by the last, you know, 97 days or change, the president is much bolder, much more decisive, and much more comfortable with risk-taking than the Republicans in Congress.
00:30:47.000He's got to get Republicans to take some of these incredible executive orders and actually pass them through the legislature so that they can survive further into the future and they could...
00:30:58.000You know, still be the law, even if power changes in four or hopefully 12 years.
00:31:32.000Look, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity right now to get back to the roots of the intent of what made America such a spectacular place.
00:31:43.000We have allowed so much of this nonsense and this garbage to infect every major institution.
00:31:55.000It is starting from square one when you realize how much of our country is being held back by affirmative action, being held back by DEI, being held back by the legal theory of disparate impact,
00:32:12.000and how corrupt these elite institutions have become.
00:32:17.000And it is incumbent on all of us, including President Trump, to keep the pressure on.
00:32:25.000You notice that this hasn't actually received that much news coverage.
00:32:28.000They are more worried about Abrego Garcia than they are about affirmative action.
00:32:36.000Well, they actually know that affirmative action is a major losing argument for them.
00:32:42.000When affirmative action is presented to the mayor, they say, wait a second, you get extra points if you're of a black skin color and you get less points if you're white skin color.
00:32:49.000That's exactly what affirmative action is.
00:32:52.000President Trump is fighting forward in a colorblind, in a merit-based, in a character-based agenda.